Transversals: Reverberations Across Contested Lines

Artist Statement \ Paula Gerstenblatt

Content and Form \ Jan Piribeck

Introduction \ Louis Miller

Transversals \ Artworks

This exhibition narrates a personal journey and a continued focus of my work on how the individual narrative anchors the collective and vice versa. This series explores an emotionally charged landscape, juxtaposing and upending fixed and “righteous” perspectives to reveal the flexibility found in reoriented boundaries. Through a synthesis of historic and contemporary maps, personal photographs and text, and other archival sources, these works function as transversals — lines of inquiry across contested spaces. My intention is not to represent one side or many sides, rather, expand dialog as an artist/scholar whose visits to Israel over the past 49 years mark phases of life that parallel milestones of the region, including the historic visit of Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem in 1977 when hope was palpable. While in tragic contrast to the current reality, perhaps we are called, in the spirit of James Baldwin, to “invent hope everyday”.

Artist Statement \ Paula Gerstenblatt

Welcome to this big, complicated story. How far do you want to go back? To touching tender hearts?

This exhibition was motivated by the tragedy of October 7th and the subsequent war in Gaza. Using historic and contemporary maps and brochures from diverse sources, personal photographs, text from my prose and poetry, and other archival materials, I explore the complexity and nuance of an emotionally charged landscape of contested spaces. I am interested in how what we believe to be fixed, absolute, righteous, and undeniable may be more flexible when we shift our orientation to boundaries, borders, and perspective. This work continues my focus on how individual narratives anchor collective ones, and how collective histories shape the personal.

If you want to understand how we got here dig in – deep. It is a long and large trajectory going back millennia. Years of conquest, resistance, rising and falling empires, religious wars, exile, changing borders, and claims of contested territories. Words of caution. Words period. Maps. Interpretation. Ghosts everywhere. It’s messy. Good luck.

I researched historic maps from the Ottoman Empire to the present, drawing from a range of perspectives including the BBC, United Nations, Palestinian Academic Society, and a Jordanian tourist map of Jerusalem pre-1967. Originally, this exhibition was titled Contested Territories, focusing on the fluidity of borders, complicated trajectories, and diasporic dispersion. However, after my recent visit to Israel, and months in the studio, that title no longer held. The idea of transversals – a line that intersects at least two others – felt more precise. The personal and political. Past and present. Converging. Reverberating.

This is my story of moving, being on the land through decades and life phases. I chose what I chose. I went back. Retraced her steps, looking for her. Imprinted new ones. Wondered about it all. I am still ironing out the details.

As part of my process, I comb through old photos, journals, and personal artifacts. Unexpectedly, I discovered my mother’s journal and photo album from my parents’ trip to Israel in 1992. Tucked under a stack of books in my studio were photos of my daughter and me in Jerusalem in 1998. In a storage area at the family home in California, I uncovered a long-forgotten box filled with Jerusalem Post newspapers from Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, an old bus ticket, a 1977 map of bus routes, business cards from a store in Tel Aviv that no longer exists, poetry in folded sheets of paper, and a series of paintings – People in Boxes – created in 1979 in my former bomb shelter studio, alongside watercolors of Sinai on cheap brown sketch paper.
Ghosts always find us. We can’t hide from them, or ourselves unless we are willing to extract humanity from our souls. It is a steep price.

Stumbling across these precious artifacts, which I thought lost or forgot existed, was like excavating buried memories. I read my mother’s words and stared at photos of her and my father from 1992, smiling for the camera in spaces I stood just weeks before. I ran my finger across faded images of my cousin Kelly, who died 30 years ago, as we clowned with friends on Kibbutz Shefayim – time traveling with ghosts across a place woven emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and creatively into this work.

Maps are storytellers, containers of memory, charting our moving lives and lines, drawn and redrawn. So many tricksters in these maps. The world is not flat and neither are these narratives.

My process involves the deliberate juxtaposition of historic and contemporary maps beneath Mylar sheets. Traced with colored pencils and saturated with oil bars, pastels and pigment sticks, these layers collide with hand-drawn images of objects, animals, ghost symbols, poetry, and text to create a visual language containing humor, mystery, grief, fascination, love, longing, and despair. This reorientation, repetition, and use of the personally significant invite the viewer to explore possibilities beyond the obvious and construct new meanings of their own.

Turns out our hard edges and absolutes are splitting apart – shredded dreams, borers, bodies, illusions and contested claims moving, morphing, colliding across time, space, hearts, minds, and formed identity.

My intention in this body of work is not to represent all sides, but to expand dialog as an artist and scholar whose personal experience traversing Israel marks critical phases of my life and development. These moments parallel milestones of the region, including the historic visit of Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem in 1977, when hope felt palpable.

The installation of yellowed, frayed newspapers documenting Sadat’s visit, placed above shredded mounds of maps, newspapers, and cardboard, represents a tension between hope and despair. It is both memory and warning. These are gut-wrenching times, with yet another war shaping the fate of the region and reverberating across the world.

Wounds of the past haunt us. It is tempting to retreat into absolutes or bury our heads in the sand. But perhaps those old newspapers – showing former enemies Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin shaking hands – are more than historical artifacts. Perhaps they are a call, in the spirit of James Baldwin, to invent hope every day.

Acknowledgements
I want to express my gratitude to Hedva Rokach and Itay Buhur for creating this beautiful catalog, Louis Miller for writing the introduction, and Jan Piribeck for writing the essay and sharing her insight in the process of creating this show. A heartfelt thanks to the Maine Jewish Museum for this exhibition and continued support for my work over the years.

Content and Form \ Jan Piribeck

Paula Gerstenblatt’s use of maps and archival documents combined with her personal iconography creates a space where borders shift and time is fluid. Her exhibit is made of collages, drawings, paintings, and found objects that depict multiple sites and time periods from divergent vantage points. This approach calls to mind the early 20th century Cubist movement, where the concept of simultaneity of viewpoint beckoned the viewer to engage with the subject matter from many different angles at once. The Cubists were informed by views from airplanes; Gerstenblatt is informed by satellite views, which she spins and combines to create non-linear narratives about a region that she and her family visited over a period of fifty years. The artist is also a researcher, and since early adulthood has studied the history of Israel and the Middle East going back to the Ottoman Empire. She recently sojourned to Israel to stand on historical sites and learn more about the experiences of people living there post October 7, 2023.

Her materials include frosted Mylar, which is a flexible, transparent substrate that allows for a painterly blending of oil bars. She often pushes the pigment around with her fingers to create tactile surfaces that compress space and confound fixed borders. The Mylar also works well with colored pencils, which are used to inscribe lines, shapes and written passages. In addition to reorienting territories through layering and juxtaposing landmasses, Gerstenblatt varies the orientation of the picture plane as part of her process. She turns one aerial map on its vertical axis and disrupts its overall patterning by stacking horizontal strips across the bottom section.

These strips contain images of personal and cultural artifacts such as bus tickets, shoes and chairs. The use of repetition and stacking calls attention to what may otherwise be seen as mundane subject matter. The artist showcases these objects to demonstrate their importance to her. One strip contains figures in boxes, which signifies a period in her life when she maintained a studio in a bomb shelter in 1979 at Kibbutz Shefayim. The constraint of the walls is palpable and serves as a powerful analogy for how we can be trapped by social conditions and each confined by our own device.

In addition to the aerial maps, Gerstenblatt includes a large layered panoramic landscape sourced from two photos that her mother took in 1992 of Tel Aviv from the old town of Jaffa. The artist wanted a more traditional landscape to be a centerpiece of the show, something to anchor viewers in a recognizable space. She applied borders to the panorama’s top and bottom composed of fragmented images and textures torn from the Aqueduct Beach painting, which is situated in the ancient ruins of a thriving port built by Herod between 22-10 BCE to honor Augustus Ceasar. She feels it is important to acknowledge this long and complex past to fully understand the present cultural and geopolitical dynamics in Israel and the surrounding region.

One piece in the exhibition departs from the others where materials and processes are concerned. Still, it is in close keeping with the content of the show as it illustrates the history and complexity of the region. That is the installation of newspaper pages, brown and brittle with age, covering Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977. For many, it was a time of promise and hope that faded due to unresolved conflicts and Sadat’s eventual assassination. The plinth beneath the newspapers holds 3 mounds of shredded paper and Mylar maps representing the unraveling of the peace process and destruction of war. The artist saved the newspaper articles from when she lived in Jerusalem in 1977 and now presents them in the context of her show.
The use of plywood supports are an integral part of the aesthetic statement. The panels and plinth provide a formal presence but stop short of being too polished or precious. There is a rawness in presentation that matches the subject matter.

Israel is a place of contrast, and the artists embodies this in her exhibition. She does not adhere to a singular style or approach; rather, she uses a variety of elements and forms to arrive at a cohesive statement about the intricacies of Israel and her relationship to it. The sgraffito ghosts scratched into the surfaces of her work are looming reminders of how the past and present collide, and personal motifs such as the coyote trickster and her beloved dog Pearl are scattered throughout to illustrate how subjective experience blends and morphs into an ever unfolding social and geographical space.

* Jan Piribeck is an Emerita Professor of Art at the University of Southern Maine.

Introduction \ Louis Miller

My appreciation for the work Paula Gerstenblatt has accomplished with this show is deeply connected with my professional identity as an educator at the University of Southern Maine’s Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education. Although I am someone who has worked with historical maps for well over a decade, I cannot claim to have an expertise in the mapping of Israel, Palestine, or the Middle East. That is not how I relate to this exhibition. As someone who has spent the past half decade working with thousands of undergraduate and graduate students, teaching them how to understand, analyze, and incorporate maps and other historical documents into their research, I have seen firsthand how important it is to allow a student (or exhibit viewer) the chance to draw their own conclusions, while acknowledging and reckoning with the idea that the further one digs into the archival record, the more complex the narrative becomes. This can lead to less concretized stances and an openness for dialogue. Historians are trained to recognize that multiple truths can exist at any given time, and this exhibition hammers that crucial point, over and over again.

By situating her personal experience within this larger space, Gerstenblatt makes another crucial point: while we can and should often strive for objectivity, we can never fully erase ourselves from our understanding of broader narratives. This show is not the end; this is a conversation starter, a chance to meet in the field and reflect on our shared experiences as well as our differences. The desire to “expand dialogue” is the main reason I fell in love with history, and with working with physical archives of historical documents. Too often in this 21st century world, we rely on quick soundbites or, maybe we read a book that paints with broad brush strokes that erase any nuance or complexity that does not serve the author’s ends. It is only in working with the archival materials that long held beliefs are challenged and/or reinforced. This exhibition must be understood as being an archive, a collection of maps, photographs, text, and other visual sources. We, as viewers, by engaging in this show, are historians and researchers doing the work, helping to create a space for constructive dialogue and better understanding.

* Louis Miller is an Assistant Director for Research and Fellowship Programs, Cartographic Reference and Teaching Librarian, Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine.